From Linux.org - An Introduction To MySQL Storage Engines

For those of you who do not know, a storage engine is what stores, handles, and retrieves information from a table. There is no "perfect" or "recommended" storage engine to use, but for most applications the default MyISAM is fine. In MySQL there are 10 different storage engines, though all of them may not be available to you. To get a list of supported storage engines on your MySQL Server, you can do: